A Note About Footnotes

You will notice there are no footnotes in my posts, including posts which show family groups and descendants. This is not deliberate, but instead demonstrates my ignorance of the ins and outs of blogging and html. If and when I ever figure out how to do footnotes on this blog, you will see them. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the sources for my information, just drop me an e-mail and I will be glad to share them.

Matlocks: Thomas A. Matlock and Mary Adeline Stratton

This is the final family from the Absolom C. Matlock and Nancy Malvina Harris family. According to a note in Eunice Sandlings "History of the Floyd Family," this brother of my great-great grandmother Angeline Elizabeth Matlock was "ordained as a ruling Elder of the Presbyterian Church of Lisbon, 1886. Ordained with E. A. Gracey and T. M. Goodnight. News clipping says he was engaged in hardware business in Petrolia." Thomas and Addie are buried in Petrolia Cemetery, Clay Co., Texas, next to Dona and Boon Slayback, daughter and son-in-law of Thomas' sister Angeline Matlock Floyd.

Thomas A. Matlock
b. 20 Oct 1859, Dallas Co., Texas
d. 19 Jun 1925, Petrolia, Clay, Texas
& Mary Adeline “Addie” Stratton
b. 7 Sep 1859, Texas
d. 30 Jan 1936, Houston, Harris County, Texas
|--- Ollie T. Matlock
|----- b. 16 Dec 1888, Texas
|----- d. 19 Mar 1976, Wichita Falls, Wichita, Texas
|--- & Eleanor
|----- b. 14 Jul 1892, Texas
|----- d. 14 Aug 1989, Texas
|------- | Joan Matlock
|--------- | b. 1919, Texas

Based on the name of the informant on Ollie T. Matlock's death certificate, Joan may have married a Wittmire.

Death Certificates and Obituaries from Greenville, SC

Yes, another cheerful title for a blog post. Previously it was Texas death certificates from the Family Research pilot site (see link under "General"); now I am focusing on death in South Carolina. Texas and South Carolina are my top two research states, and these obituaries and certificates are certainly advancing my research.

The inspiration for obtaining these materials was a posting on the Rootsweb mailing list for Greenville, SC, by a researcher who is local to the area and will obtain and mail the obituaries for a nominal fee. She was extremely helpful and also volunteered to acquire copies of death certificates for some of the people in the obituaries. Some of the Greenville obituaries cover people in Anderson County, SC, as well, so there were several descendants of my great-great grandparents William Spencer Moore and Emily Tarrant Moore, but the majority were for descendants of William Spencer Moore's brother, Bud Mathis Moore. I realized that I need to "strike while the iron is hot" and start entering data on the Bud Mathis Moore family in my genealogy program so that I could find additional names for obituary and death certificate requests, so it has been the Bud Mathis Moore family that I have been researching lately. (A note of explanation: I have been inputting information into my genealogy program by levels, from parents to grandparents, then all the great-grandparents, and I was at the great-great grandparent level. Doing the Bud Mathis Moore family actually means going back to the great-great-great grandparent level, since this means doing the family of Samuel Moore, father of William Spencer and Bud Mathis. Samuel Moore is as far back as I have been able to go at this point, and I do not yet know who his wife was.)

The Moores are one of my main areas of research, and I have benefitted greatly from information shared with me by other researchers. My original discovery that my gg-grandfather William Spencer Moore had a brother named Bud Mathis Moore was due to a posting by a descendant of B. M. Moore, Mary Newton. She introduced me by e-mail to several other descendants and we got in touch with another B.M. Moore descendant who had researched the family. The Bud Mathis Moore connection led to the Greenville connection as the point of origin for William Spencer Moore, and this helped me find the will for his and Bud's father Samuel Moore (establishing him as their father) on the South Carolina Archives website. Recently, while researching the B.M. Moore family, I found two other people who had a lot of information on that family. So there is quite a large body of information on descendants of Samuel Moore of Greenville District, South Carolina, which I expect to be supplemented by more obituaries and death certificates. So ... it appears that this compilation of Samuel Moore descendants will be one of my big projects (I would be something like an editor and co-compiler with the other researchers).

First Experience at a Family History Center

You will notice that my last post on this blog was dated 2 Nov 2008. That does not mean that I was too busy to do genealogy for most of this month; I was just too busy to spend the longer stretch that writing requires as opposed to just fitting in bits and pieces of research here and there. In fact, quite a few things that have helped advance my research have taken place this month. There was actually an entire day I took off early in the month to visit the local Family History Center (FHC) in McLean. The Fairfax Genealogy Society organizes trips to various local (and sometimes not-so-local) research venues for tours and instruction, and this FHC is one of the regular sites visited. The volunteers were very gracious and helpful, and it was tremendous fun to share stories with them and other visiting researchers. The McLean Center has undergone some recent improvements and is a very pleasant setting for research. The Center has numerous research guides and six or seven terminals for accessing online databases. Though there were a number of these databases that were of interest to me, I focused on Footnote, since I already knew that it contained a number of documents of interest, I have not yet purchased a personal subscription, and there were several Civil War service records that I was keenly interested in obtaining.

Here are the service records I pulled: Joseph M. C. Norman, Preston E. Moore, James West Lewis, Richard M. Brinlee, Samuel D. Lewis, Manning P. Lewis, and William T. Sisson. I also printed out a birth certificate for Odessa Beatrice Lewis, daughter of Elizabeth Ann Brinlee and Harve Mulder. The Civil Service records will keep me busy for quite a while; as a matter of fact, I seem to be falling into the genealogy trap of collecting materials without devoting sufficient time to transcribing and reviewing them -- that will have to be one of my New Year's resolutions!

There are still a few more service records and other records on Footnote that I am interested in, but because it takes time to pull the images up on Footnote and the printer at the FHC is fairly slow, there was just not enough time. I look forward to returning for more research, and the Center is open late during the week for an evening or two, so I won't even have to take time off from work to do research. Before the next visit I will probably visit the Family Search website to find materials to be ordered from Salt Lake City. But first, getting to those transcriptions....

Descendants of David Floyd? - Part 2

Although I knew of Sada Crum’s existence, I had never found her after the 1900 census and assumed that she must not have had any descendants. Some time later I was doing the census work for as many members of the David Floyd family as I could and decided to search to see what had happened to Mason Crum. The 1920 census showed a grandson named Clyde Robertson, age 13, living with Mason and Annie Crum in Hopkins County, Texas. Audry and Alma were too young to have a son that age, so … my next step was to look for Clyde Robertson in the 1910 census … and there he was, with his parents “Josphes” and “Saddie” and brother Earl, age 6. The 1920 census had a story to tell for this family: Clyde was living with his grandparents, brother Earl was living with James and Addie Robertson (James would appear to be his uncle), and a third son, L.D., was shown living with the family of his aunt, Mary (Aiguier) Vaden. Seaf (Josphes = Josephus “Seaf”) was living with the family of his niece, Eddie (Vaden) Evans, daughter of Mary Auguier Vaden. Seaf’s status was listed as married, not widowed. So where was Sada/Sadie/Saddie?

The 1920 census shows a Saddie Robertson, age 47, as a patient in the North Texas Hospital for the Insane in Terrell, Kaufman County, Texas. The age is too old for our Sada, but accuracy was probably not much of a concern in recording the patients’ ages, so this may very well be her. The 1930 census shows Seaf with a new wife, Altha, and Altha’s daughter Willie Juanita Martin. Many of these people are buried in the Aiguier Cemetery in Hopkins County, Texas, including Sadie Robertson, who did not die until 9 July 1960 according to her death certificate, which gives her date of birth as 16 July 1884. Also buried there is son Earl Robertson, dates 20 September 1903 to 20 March 1973.

The following paragraph appears in the GenWeb page on Men and Women in the Armed Forces from Hopkins County Sulphur Springs, Texas, WWII (the URL is http://gen.1starnet.com/hopkins/worldwarII.htm):

“ROBERTSON. L.D. Pvt., son of Mr. and Mrs. Seaf Robertson. Entered Army Sig Corps in November 1941. Trained at Ft. Sill, OK. _Served in Algeria, French Morroco, Sicily, Tunisia, Naples, Rome, France, Central Europe. Has Bronze Stars, American Defense Medal. _Discharged in 1945.”

Clyde Robertson may be the Clyde M. Robertson on the 1930 census of approximately the right age living with wife Lois and daughter Wenonah as boarders in the household of John H. Mauldin in Jack County, Texas. According to the Texas Birth Index, these Mauldins would have been Lois’ family, and this would be Clyde Miles Robertson and Lois Esteline Mauldin. Texas records lists children born to them, so these could be descendants of David Floyd and Zillah Kelly. Perhaps Earl and L. D. also had children.

Descendants of David Floyd? - Part 1

David Floyd was the oldest brother of my great-grandfather Charles Augustus Floyd. I put a question mark after the title of this post because it is not certain that there are currently living descendants of David Floyd, but I recently discovered that at least one of his daughters may very well have living descendants.

Here is what is currently known about the family of David Floyd and his wife Zillah Kelly (Claywell Floyd Lovett – more on her three marriages later):

David Harriet Floyd
b. 1836, Illinois
d. ca 1867
& Zilla Ann Kelly
b. Jun 1839
d. 9 Jan 1914, Sipe Springs, Comanche Co., Texas
m. 23 Dec 1858, Dallas County, TX
| Eliza Ellen Floyd
| b. 1860, Dallas County, TX
| d. bef 1890
| & Mason W. Crum
| b. Mar 1852, Kentucky
| d. 1930, Hopkins, Texas
| m. 16 Apr 1880
| David Angeline Floyd
| b. 1863, Texas
| d. bef 1900
| & George W. Bingham
| m. 21 Jul 1884

It is apparent from the 1900 census that Eliza must have died by 1890, because Mason Crum and his new wife Anna married in about 1890. In addition to Mason and Anna’s daughters Audry and Alma, there is a third daughter, Sada, born in 1884 according to the census. Sada must have been Eliza’s daughter.

This was as far as the line had gone as far as we Floyd researchers knew. At one point when I was researching this family I took a little “detour” to find out who Zillah Floyd was. The item that initially aroused my curiosity was the 1860 census entry for her and David. [David died some time before 1870, when Zillah had already remarried to a man named Elihu Lovett. I am guessing that David Floyd died some time in 1867 or perhaps early 1868 because he appeared in the partition of father George Floyd’s land in 1867 and he witnessed the marriage of his brother Charles to Angeline Matlock on 13 Jan 1867. ] On the 1860 census, a young (5 years old) boy who is referred to as Noah Penny is shown living with David, Zillah, and their daughter Eliza. How was he related to this family? The first place I looked for clues, as I always do for the Floyds, was Eunice Sandling’s History of the Floyd Family, which stated that David Floyd married Zillah Claywell on 23 December 1858. I tried to find a Zillah Claywell with her family on the 1850 census for Illinois but could not; however, Claywells and Pennys did turn up in Sangamon County on that census.

Searches for Zilla(h) Claywell/Lovett and for Eli Lovett brought up several posts on genealogy discussion boards. As I started to track these down, it became clear that Zilla’s maiden name was not Claywell, but that she had married a Claywell and had son Noah from that marriage. Noah’s last name was actually Claywell, and he appears in later censuses under that name, but perhaps the census-taker associated him with the Penny family in Dallas County, which had also come from Sangamon County, Illinois. A little more searching revealed that Zillah’s maiden name was Kelley. By this time I had discussions going with two of her descendants both on the discussion boards and through e-mail, and I even ended up in one of those Texas two-hour-long phone calls with one of them. Eventually we straightened out Zillah’s marriage history. Zillah’s first husband was Warren Claywell, by whom she had son Noah; her second husband was David Floyd, by whom she had daughters Eliza Ellen and David Angeline; and her third husband was Eli Lovett, by whom she had children John Wayne and Emily Lucy. The first and third families and their descendants knew of one another’s existence, but did not know of the David Floyd family until we found one another online. Why was this? The 1900 census contained a possible explanation: both Eliza Ellen and David Angeline had died by 1900 (the census showed that Zilla had had five children, of whom three were still living, and those three were Noah, John, and Emily). I knew that Eliza had died, and apparently David Angeline (who married a George W. Bingham) had as well, which explained why I could not find her on the 1900 census.

I will continue on the fate of Sada Crum in the next post.